Faith in Practice

The 11th chapter of Hebrews and we start at verse 1. Now faith, and I'm reading from the authorized version this morning. Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. For by it the elders obtained a good report.

Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear. By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain by which he obtained witness that he was righteous. God testifying of his gifts and by it he being dead yet speaketh.

By faith Enoch was translated that he should not see death and was not found because God had translated him. For before his translation he had this testimony that he pleased God. But without faith it is impossible to please him.

For he that cometh to God must believe that he is and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him. By faith Noah being warned of God of things not seen as yet moved with fear prepared Enoch to the saving of his house by the which he condemned the world and became heir of the righteousness which is by faith. By faith Abraham when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance obeyed and he went out not knowing whither he went.

By faith he sojourned in the land of promise as in a strange country dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob the heirs with him of the same promise. For he looked for a city which hath foundations whose builder and maker is God. Through faith also Sarah herself received strength to conceive seed and was delivered of a child when she was past age because she judged him faithful who had promised.

Therefore sprang there even of one and him as good as dead so many as the stars of the sky in multitude and as the sand which is by the seashore innumerable. These all died in faith not having received the promises but having seen them afar off and were persuaded of them and embraced them and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. For they that say such things declare plainly that they seek a country and truly if they had been mindful of that country from whence they came out they might have had the opportunity to have returned.

But now they desire a better country that is in heavenly wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God for he hath prepared for them a city. The Lord will bless that reading to us from his word. Let's meet unbelief with faith.

Faith is not something that you work up, it's something that comes down from the Lord. So let's be asking him for the gift of a greater faith as we sing this old fashioned hymn. And all my relief will surely appear I can't even soothe my fevered heart When Christ in the last hour my smile hath restored He taught me my ways, he is my guide His hand to obey, his kiss to provide Blessed is that we know him, that we know to pray The word he hath spoken shall surely prevail His love inside us, all is mean to see He'll lift me at last, with trouble to see His sweet evangelism, my love he'll renew Comforts his good pleasure to help me my way Since all that I need shall work for my good The misery's sweet, the pleasure is due The faithful and present will teach me the law And they know how pleasant the conqueror's strife And now I want to, because I feel the impulse of the Spirit so to do, challenge you in the area of your faith.

Our starting point, Hebrews 11 verse 6 Without faith it is impossible to please God because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him. How is the church described in the Acts of the Apostles? And the surprising answer is not with the name church. More frequently than not you discover that the community of Christian people are described by that beautiful word, the believers.

Acts chapter 2 and verse 24 makes some reference to those who have believed on the Lord Jesus Christ. And to start with I've given you the wrong reference. It's verse 44.

All the believers. Acts 2 verse 44. All the believers were together and had everything in common.

You proceed into the story of the Acts of the Apostles and you discover the same thing in the fourth verse of the fourth chapter. Many who heard the message believed. And then the thirty-third verse, the thirty-second verse.

All the believers were one in heart and mind. Later on the question is put, did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed? So the noun, the descriptive noun believers is one that is most popular in the Acts of the Apostles to describe the church. Someone has said that faith is the grace of all graces.

What does that mean? Well, faith and belief are almost synonymous terms. If you believe, then you have mounted to the heights of all graces. Nobody, says an old-fashioned preacher from the Puritan days, nobody can occupy higher spiritual ground than simply that of being a believer.

Are you a believer? Faith in action, in practice. That's what I want to talk to you about. And we do so by opening up our subject and we think of the origin of faith.

And another surprising thing in Scripture is that faith is not something that you conjure up. Faith is something that's given you by the Lord. By grace are you saved through faith, Ephesians 2, and that not of yourself.

It is the gift of God. God gives liberally. He gives to those who ask Him faith to continue to believe.

The very crumb of faith that you had at the beginning of your Christian pilgrimage, assuming that you are a believer, came from the Lord. You might have thought it was as a result of your own ingenuity. That's the general understanding of someone who's young in the faith.

But when you get further into the Word of God, you find that it wasn't that you moved towards the Lord. It was that God in a magnetic fashion moved towards you with grace that the Puritans would call irresistible. And so you come to the Lord who has in the first instance given you the grace to believe.

There's one thing that pleases God. Faith. There's one thing that annoys God, and that is unbelief.

The Lord Jesus, who's always very gentle as a teacher, will nonetheless give you examples in His ministry of the fate that awaits those who don't believe. Look at Luke's gospel in chapter 12, a reference which isn't on my overhead. Luke's gospel in chapter 12, and the forty-sixth verse.

Our Lord Jesus speaking, and when He speaks, He always does so compassionately and tenderly, but His tenderness and compassion do not allow Him to be fudged. In the area of straight speaking, when warnings have to be given. Now, this particular verse is in a parable.

The parable needs to be interpreted, and I haven't got the time. But even when you've done with metaphor and simile, the point arrests you. Let me read verse 46 of Luke 12, as to the fate of those who do not trust the Lord Jesus.

The master of that servant will come on a day when he does not expect Him, and at an hour he is not aware of. He will cut him to pieces and assign him a place with the unbelievers. Now, I'd like to have the opportunity to expand that parable, and maybe in the new series there will be such an opportunity given.

But my point is this, that to be in the category of an unbeliever, according to our Lord Jesus, is to find yourself in a very serious situation indeed. Disbelief or unbelief, says one of the older hymns, is sure to err. And the error of unbelief is this, it actually confronts the revealed will and word of the Lord, and denies the truth of what God is saying.

You say you don't understand. All right, I'll open it up to you. And I'll do so by taking you to a scripture that some of you knew in earlier years when you were at Sunday school.

Let's go to Numbers and chapter 13. Ten men went to, twelve men went to Spyncanon. Ten were bad, two were good.

Some saw the giants great and tall, some saw the grapes in clusters fall, some saw that God was in it all. Ten were bad, two were good. Well, it might not win the prize for beautiful poetry, but it does get across what is the essence of the story in Numbers 13, where you get the report of the spies who went into the land of Palestine as a sort of reconnaissance party, and they brought back their feelings, their evaluation to Moses.

And you will find in the twenty-sixth verse that as they report to the whole assembly and told them something of the nature of the land, they then give an evaluation. And they say in the thirty-sixth verse of the next chapter, Moses now making comment, so the men Moses had sent to explore the land who returned and made the whole community grumble against him by spreading a bad report. Did you hear that? Say they spread an inaccurate report, because what they had to say was quite right.

To regain Palestine was a tremendous challenge in terms of faith. But they brought in negative advice. God had said do one thing, they said don't do it.

And that is the language of unbelief. Unbelief always argues with the revealed word of the Lord. And that's the reason why the unbeliever is in such a fearful condition.

Let me demonstrate that again to you. Not from the Old Testament, but from the New. Here is the Apostle Peter.

And Peter gave the information recorded in the second gospel. And in the ninth chapter, you have got one of the great peaks in the career of Peter. Here he is with our Lord and the rest of the disciples.

And Jesus puts a question, you recall, to all the disciples. He speaks in terms of his own identity. Who actually am I? Who do you think I am? And they give various responses.

I've got again the wrong verse here. Hang on and I'll find it. Various responses are given in terms of, it's the eighth chapter, various responses are given in terms of who our Lord is.

Peter is the one who says, you are the Christ, the son of the living God. That's in the 29th verse of chapter eight, right? Now in a few moments, Jesus then starts to teach the disciples that actually he's going to go to Jerusalem and there he will be crucified. And in the 32nd verse, he spoke plainly about this.

And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But when Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, he rebuked Peter. Get behind me, Satan, he said.

You do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men. You see the great sin. Here is our Lord Jesus in this eighth chapter of Mark's gospel.

And he knows why he has come onto this earth and what ultimately he should do. And Peter in great faith declares who he is. But then in colossal unbelief, he moves towards the Lord Jesus and he says, no, not Jerusalem, not for you.

And Jesus spins around and says, Satan, man, he is in the category, you see, of an unbeliever at that point. Without faith, it's impossible to please God. The unbelievers displease the Lord.

Romans 14 and verse 23 will tell you that everything that is without faith is sin. Whatever is not of faith is sin. Now at this point, somebody might make an objection.

And they may say, well, this is quite unreasonable. That God should expect me to place faith in him? Surely the most reasonable thing is that I ought to do what my mind tells me to do. In other words, my reason is to be understood as being of far greater importance than faith.

Remember how William Shakespeare makes one of his characters say, there is more in this world, Horatio, than thy philosophy dreamed of. If you were to understand the whole of the world, if you were to understand God, you would be God yourself. You could not drain the ocean with a bucket.

You can just take a sample of what is in the ocean. So as far as the knowledge of the universe is concerned, as far as the knowledge of God is concerned, you are like the bucket. Your reason is like the bucket.

Now the faith that God asks you to have in him is not anti-reason, but it will surpass reason. There will be things that you can understand. There will be things that you cannot understand.

And in the area where you cannot understand, God asks you to exercise faith in him. It says another preacher, the devil labors to put out the right eye of faith and to leave only the left eye of reason. There is no proof given in the Bible that God is behind creation.

It is just a simple statement. God created the heavens and the earth. By faith you believe that.

There is no proof ever offered in the Bible for the existence of God. Simply the disarming remark, the fool has said in his heart, there is no God. God builds on that intuitive knowledge that you and I have that as created beings we have come from a creator.

And if there is a creator who is far greater than we are, then it is not committing intellectual suicide to submit your puny reason to the grand revelation of God in Scripture. So you see, what is crucial in this whole debate between belief and unbelief is whether or not God lies or whether he tells the truth. And so the spies were punished by the Lord and Peter was criticized by Jesus because they made reason.

The pivot on which the argument swung instead of revelation. Ah, but you say, Mr. Preacher, I have a faith, but my faith is so very tiny. I want to tell you never to despise a tiny faith.

The Lord Jesus in references that I have put up there but I haven't time to hunt out makes reference to the fact that the smallest seed in Palestine is the mustard seed. And he goes on to say, and again, there is an area of hyperbole in this language. There is an area of simile in this language, an area of metaphor.

If you had the faith as of the grain of mustard seed, you could say to this mountain, Be moved. Look, I want to help those of you for whom faith is not an easy thing to hang on to. The fact that you don't have a full-blooded faith like maybe some of our missionary friends here have.

Although I've known missionaries whose faith has almost been smashed to smithereens out in the third world. If you don't have a great faith, even if you've just got a small faith, you're hanging on by your fingernails. Don't in any way despise that faith.

Faith starts very often with small beginnings. There is an expression used sometimes in evangelical circles about the school of Christ. And what do you do when you go to school? There was a great Scottish preacher in the 1950s by the name of Tom Allen.

I only heard him once, and it was in the company of F.F. Bruce. Who, again, I only met once. Tom Allen was rehearsing the story of his daughter.

He got a little five-year-old daughter and she went to school. And on the first occasion she was so worried. And apparently she said to her teacher, Miss, I think there's something you ought to know.

I can neither read nor write. Well, precisely, that's the reason for going to school. She had the seed of knowledge.

And possibly even a desire for that knowledge to be improved upon. So it is with our faith, even if it has just a small beginning. You see, when you read the Gospels, you sometimes find our Lord saying to people that he ministers to, do you have faith in me? Now later on you will find the Apostles, when they write their lofty epistles and tell us great theology.

You'll find Jude, for example, in the third verse of the epistle that bears his name saying, Dear friends, although I was very eager to write to you about the salvation we share, I felt I had to write and urge you to contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints. And you think of this great faith, those of you who are into the Bible, justification, sanctification, utter trust in our Lord Jesus, you've got all the eschatology worked out, you know what's going to happen at the end of time, and so on and so forth. And some of you have summarized that faith in the creedal statement, and you can say the creed with great understanding.

Now when Jesus was talking to the Syrophoenician woman and recognized her faith, he wasn't thinking in terms of great tomes, as to his deity and his humanity and how they were in some way admixtured. He wasn't thinking in terms of the Trinitarian concept of God Father, God Son, God the Holy Spirit. Bless you, this woman had probably never even been to college.

She probably even never read a book. But our Lord is concerned about her and a man whose son is demon possessed, he's concerned about that little bit, that teeny morsel of faith in him. Do you have that faith? And when Jesus just discovered that little crumb of faith, as a result of it, he was able to do great things for the people who came across his pathway.

Faith has small beginnings, even if you're just holding on, as I say, by your fingertips. So what? You are holding on, thank God. You're pleasing him in some degree.

But I don't want to give you an excuse just to stay where you are, because the thing about faith is that it has capability of growth, capability to grow. Individually, people can grow in faith. Churches can grow in faith, collectively.

The star in this whole area, in terms of an illustration, must be the man to whom I made reference a little while ago. So let's turn to Mark's gospel in chapter 9. And here in the 24th verse, I'll spell out the context as you're turning to it. Here is this man, and he's so upset.

Why? Well, his poor lad is a wretched case, if ever there was one. Can you imagine what it must be to have a boy who's possessed by evil spirits who can't control himself? Throws himself into the fire or water, trying to kill himself. And with tremendous pathos, this man is described as coming before the Lord Jesus.

If you can do anything, take pity on us and help us. Jesus says in verse 23 of Mark 9, if you can, everything is possible for him who believes. Immediately, verse 24, the boy's father exclaimed, and this is brilliant, I do believe.

I'm hanging on by my fingernails. Help me overcome my unbelief. And Jesus doesn't criticize him at all, does he? You see, if you're asking for more faith, the Lord Jesus will never turn your request and put it on one side.

He's there to dispense faith. And faith, be it ever so small, the sort of faith that prompted this man to come to the Lord Jesus, can be built upon. And it's not only people like him who need to know an increase of faith.

Here are our Lord's disciples. Look, chapter 17. They'd been with him for a long period of time.

You might have felt that they were oozing with faith. They'd seen the lepers healed. They'd witnessed amazing miracles performed by our Savior.

And yet they come to him in the fifth verse of Luke 17, and they say to the Lord, increase our faith. I'm constantly asking God to increase my faith. I'm not asking for your sympathy when I say, I've had one of the most draining weeks I've ever had pastorally.

Just to find time to do essential things has been so difficult because of some of the situations in which I have found myself in. And some of those human tragedies have been ones in which I have had to come before the Lord and say, Lord, I've got faith, but it's this big. And I need faith that is that big.

Help me, Lord, so that you can lift my small faith up to the level that is required. And there's nothing dishonorable in doing that. It's a way of faith to want to grow.

And in growth, sometimes you can have a battle. I'm not made of wooden stone. When I'm visiting someone who's dying from cancer and my prayers for recovery don't seem to be answered, there are questions that race through my mind.

But when there are marital problems the like of which I can't disentangle, then I just don't go home and forget about these things. You have to bring them to the Lord. And you need to leave the burden with Him and believe that He will respond to you and build on the faith that you have in degree.

And don't you see, my dear beloved friends at the tab, not just individual faith is necessary, but corporate faith to develop so that churches can become outstanding as far as daring, being daring for God is concerned. Go to 2 Corinthians in chapter 10 and verse 15 where the apostle is speaking about his desire for the church at Corinth. 2 Corinthians 10.15, halfway through the verse, Our hope is that as your faith continues to grow, our area of activity among you will greatly expand.

Go to 2 Thessalonians and the first chapter and the third verse and you get a similar sort of comment. We ought always to thank God for you, brothers, and rightly so because your faith is growing more and more and the love every one of you has for each other is increasing. I haven't always found it easy to negotiate schemes and projects here at the tab.

I haven't always had the faith that was necessary. But as God has met our needs in terms of expansion, especially in terms of missionary interest, so our faith has grown more and more. We do believe that God is able to supply all the financial need and all the physical requirements that are imposed upon us in terms of sending other people to the mission field.

Twenty years ago I didn't have that sort of faith. I couldn't have believed for the missionary budget that we have here now. But faith grows amongst us corporately as it grows individually.

There will be occasions when we need special gifts of faith. If you were to go to 1 Corinthians 12 and 14 you would discover that amongst the ninefold gifts of the Spirit highlighted there, one is the gift of faith. Now every Christian needs to have faith in degree, but there are some people who have enormous faith for a specific thing.

When I was on Lagos, I remember a little while ago, I remember one German brother getting up and saying, Lord I do thank you for Dale Roton and George Verver. These were men who originally under God brought O.M. about. As others of you might be thanking God or have known those who have thanked God for Hudson Taylor and C.T. Studd, these were men with magnificent gifts of faith.

Lord, you made it possible through their remarkable faith to bring about an organization like the Worldwide Evangelization Crusade. I couldn't have believed for that, but they could. And now I've been involved in the consequence of their faith as I've worked for the Lord in WEC or AIM or CIM or whatever it is.

I spoke to Yang Yi Cho just a little while ago with this massive church in Korea, and I just wanted to check him on one or two of the things that I'd read and heard about him in terms of the criticisms that occasionally his theology is not orthodox. All I can do is to repeat what he told me. I asked him on this whole area of visualizing it in terms of answers to prayer.

I said, it sounds a little spooky. And then he said, well look, you interpret this for me. And he said, how do you preach on the text that your God is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that you could ever ask or think? Now he got me.

Because if I think on what God can do and then pray for the realization of that, then I'm conforming to the scriptural parameters. There are times when God will give a great gift of faith maybe to one person or a group of people within a fellowship, within a mission, and they'll use that faith in the realization of the will of God. What about the testings of faith? A.W. Tozer says, faith is like a muscle.

It gets stronger through stretching. Have you ever thought that sometimes we put the wrong cause behind the consequence? You imagine, and some of you will have had this experience. If all of you haven't, then we've got some very unusual people in the tab.

Sort of blind panic that God has left us. It is to me so wonderful when men of God are honest about their spiritual walk with the Lord. And I praise God that once Lloyd-Jones said to me that there came a time in his life when he could not read his Bible.

Now here we're talking about one of the greatest preachers that the United Kingdom has produced this century. He could not read his Bible. He could not even pray.

It was in the aftermath of an operation. He said, the only thing that kept me going was my knowledge of the Welsh hymns. Now in moments of panic like that, there is the consequence.

You ask, what is the cause? And you might make the wrong conclusion. Two little girls were on a train, alright? And you know how little girls can whisper so loudly that everyone else can hear but they think it's private. And they were just about to have their sandwiches and their sandwich lunch actually consisted basically of bananas.

And at the point of eating, the train, which was unlit because it was daylight, went through a tunnel. And one little girl was heard to whisper to the other, have you started to eat your banana? The other girl said, no. She said, don't.

She said, why? She said, I've just bitten mine and I've gone blind. A consequence, a wrong cause. Sometimes God will hide himself in darkness.

Not because there's anything particularly lacking in your faith, but because he wants to tease you out to a greater faith. The Puritans call it the dark night of the soul. I must rush.

I want to help parents here. I had a tremendous burden. I was out earlier in the evening yesterday and something that somebody said to me just swept over my soul.

And I felt the Lord saying that there are parents here that need help. I want to talk to you about the indestructibility of faith. Indestructibility of faith.

The Apostle Paul says, receive him who is weak in the faith, Romans 14.1. Some of you are pained because your kids are not going on with the Lord. You did your best, hand over your heart, recognizing your own imperfections. You did your best when they were children to bring them to the Lord.

You taught them Scripture. They came to Sunday school. They went to youth work and so on and so forth.

And now they seem to be nowhere. I want to tell you this, that although like an onion there may have come layers of seeming disinterest over the lives of your children, if you had that intuition from God that in early years their young faith was a genuine faith, that faith is still there. The peeling process and the rediscovery of that faith, I cannot predict.

Only that it will come. And the faith they once had will remain. Because that little teeny weeny bit of faith is utterly indestructible.

And at the end, it will be there. Because the gifts and callings of God are without repentance. And some of you parents need to stop condemning yourselves for what God does not hold you in terms of being guilty of, failing as parents.

Alright, you tell me, but it says, Pastor, if I bring my child up in the way of the Lord, when he is old he will not depart therefrom. God said that, not you. Then let God work it out.

For he's the one responsible for the writing of the Bible. Not you. Let's rush back to Hebrews.

The ancient Tsar congratulated because they maintained faith. Abraham kept faith. Moses kept faith.

Daniel kept faith. And so forth. And the way in which faith was kept was by always being true to the revelation that God gave them.

The ancients were commended, verse 2 of chapter 11. God kept a record on the fact that they believed his word. And when you go to the prophecy of Jude or the epistle of Jude, you'll find that towards the end of his epistle, he's saying build yourself up in the faith and pray in the Holy Spirit.

And Paul, writing to the Romans in the 10th chapter and the 17th verse, says faith comes by hearing. And hearing by the word of God. And the way for your faith to continue to develop is by paying greater attention to the basic essentials of Bible reading and prayer.

I saw the most remarkable spiritual recovery in the last few days simply by doing that. It sounds so crazy. But here is someone who was really adrift in their faith.

And when together we came around the word of God and the table of the Lord and in this particular occasion, some laying on of hands and anointing for healing, within three days, faith was so much more recognizable than it had been before. These men, these heroes of the faith, men and women in Hebrews 11, they're not folk who didn't go through testings. They had many a test.

Look. It is by faith that the repentant sinner is convicted. You'll need to get the tape to follow these references as I haven't written them down.

It is by faith that the repentant sinner is convicted. Acts 16.31. It is by faith that Christ dwells in our hearts. Ephesians 3.17. It is by faith that we live.

Galatians 2.20. It is by faith that we stand. Romans 11.20. It is by faith that we walk. 2 Corinthians 5.7. It is by faith we resist the devil.

1 Peter 5.8. It is by faith we are sanctified. Acts 26.18. It is by faith that we fight the good fight. 1 Timothy 6.12. It is by faith that the world is overcome.

1 John 5 and 4. Brothers and sisters, Romans tells us in the first chapter that we live by faith for faith. We start in faith. We move on to the end of life's journey in faith.

And by faith we'll be received into the Father's kingdom. You say, Mr. Preacher, I don't have enough faith. All right, we're going to ask God to increase faith right now.

Some of you are parents. Some of you are struggling because you're older people and you're afraid of the future. One of the greatest problems my dear old mom has, how will she cope at the end? And I understand that that is a real problem for so many people.

Well, I want to tell you, you'll cope at the end in the way that you've coped at the beginning and in the middle, through drawing resources from God. His faith at your disposal because he's a God who gives liberally and doesn't bring back. And in that tremendous hour, he won't leave you or desert you.

He'll remain faithful to the word that he has given to his church. Amen. Let's stand right now.

And let's just come before him personally, privately, in these last few moments and ask the Lord for this. Greater faith that you need, maybe as a parent, maybe as an employer, maybe you're unemployed, maybe you're afraid because you know that there's a sickness in your body and you're scared as to its consequences. Maybe you fear about your marriage and its future or singleness and being lonely.

I want you to know the moving of God's Spirit. Just ministering into those fears and coming against the disbelief, building you up in the most holy faith. For we know in whom we have believed and are persuaded that he is able to keep that which we've committed unto him against that day.

Lord, some of us are mothers and we're praying for our adult children. Some of us are senior citizens and we're praying for ourselves because, Lord, we're afraid of what the future may bring. Some of us have dwindling resources and we're afraid that money will run out.

Lord, we want to come to you again. Increase our faith. Help us to believe that all things are possible.

And you'll never let us go. You'll keep your good hand upon us through time and on to eternity. Bless those who've only a crumb of faith.

Build it to a greater faith. We'll sing that little song, Be still, for the presence of the Lord is in this place. Be still, for the presence of the Lord, the Holy One is here.

Come down before him now, in reverence and fear. In him, O Savior's heart, we stand on holy ground. Be still, for the presence of the Lord, the Holy One is here.

Be still, for the glory of the Lord is shining over all. He turns with holy fire, his splendor is bright. How awesome is the sight, how radiant in the light.

Be still, for the glory of the Lord is shining over all. Be still, for the power of the Lord is moving in this place. He comes to cleanse and heal, to minister his grace.

No work too hard for him, if they could see the will. Be still, for the...